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Petrie-Flom Interns’ Weekly Round-up: September 29 – October 5

On October 1, under the Affordable Care Act, Medicare started fining hospitals that have too many patients readmitted within 30 days of their discharge because of complications. A Seattle Times article covers this news.

On September 28, the Food and Drug Administration launched a national campaign, called BeSafeRx, to alert the public to the danger of internet pharmacies. A USA Today article reports the news in detail.

The Montana Supreme Court held that state restrictions on medical marijuana access and sales do not violate patients’ rights to pursue health care under the state constitution, reversing a district court opinion that blocked enforcement of new regulations on medical marijuana.

Ethics & Health Law News introduces Nicolas Terry‘s article about the threats to health privacy posed by recent development in data collection and processing. Terry suggests incremental revision the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to regulate the collection and processing of health data. The article can be found here.

On September 25, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that parents whose children are harmed or killed by allegedly defective vaccines can’t sue the manufacturers for damages and must instead accept no-fault compensation from a national tribunal for vaccination injuries, upholding the dismissal of a suit brought by a couple whose baby son died after an immunization shot. A San Francisco Chronicle article about the news can be found here.

Last week, a national anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, in a letter to Georgia legislators, requested that they drop the hospital fee that raises money for the state’s Medicaid program. Norquist’s letter ignited a heated discussion over Georgia’s hospital tax. A Kaiser Health News article introduces the story.

According to a survey at the University of Calgary in Canada, 45 percent of respondents said that money is an acceptable incentive for organ donations from living donors, and 70 percent of them responded that cash is an acceptable enticement for people to donate their organs after death. Dr. Manns, a researcher on the survey, suggests the need to consider a system that compensates organ donors. A detailed story about the survey can be found here.